Zoey Deutch

“Finally, it’s about a guy chasing a girl,” exclaims actress Zoey Deutch, co-star of Beautiful Creatures, the new Twilight-esque teen film franchise with witchy “Casters” in the place of vampires. Based on the first book in the bestselling Caster Chronicles young-adult fantasy series, the movie promises a playfully Southern-gothic, girl-powered take on the “mystical teenager struggling with human love that has dire consequences” pop trope. “The female lead is the powerful one,” Deutch says. “She has the extreme problems. And he tries to help her. It shows a guy being vulnerable, and I really appreciate that.” Deutch joins a pedigreed ensemble that includes Alden Ehrenreich, Alice Englert, Oscar nominee Viola Davis, and Academy Award winners Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson. In the film, she plays the lead mean girl, a cheerleader without supernatural resources, who is vicious enough to incite its heroine (Englert) to lose control of her magic, shatter a wall of windows, and shower her classmates with non-CGI stunt glass. Over bottled water at a coffeehouse in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Beachwood Canyon, it is immediately clear that she is playing against type: Deutch’s all-American beauty and self-effacing manner recall the wholesome loveliness of her mother, the actress Lea Thompson, beloved for her performances in ’80s coming-of-age standards such as All the Right Moves and the Back to the Future series (Deutch enthuses about her mom’s SpaceCamp Barbie doll). In fact, the 18-year-old up-and-comer, who began her career with recurring roles on the Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life on Deck and the CW Sarah Michelle Gellar thriller Ringer, is of true John Hughes legacy. Her father, Pretty in Pink (1986) helmer Howard Deutch, fell for Thompson on the set of 1987’s Hughes-written-and-produced Some Kind of Wonderful, which Deutch directed. “It was inspiring when I was old enough to realize what they had accomplished,” Deutch says of her parents, noting that she very happily lives with them and her older sister, the actress Madelyn Deutch, on a farm in Los Angeles along with some beautiful creatures of their own—horses, fish, dogs, cats, and the latest addition, a delivery of 51 chickens. “The term ‘free-range’ doesn’t do them justice,” she says. “They’re more like free-spirit chickens. I go down to the barn every morning with my coffee and hang out with them.”